Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private>
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/comp/articleshow?artid=34707852
SIDDHARTHA D KASHYAP
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
JANUARY 18, 2003
PUNE: Computer scientist Manindra Agrawal, who hit global headlines
last year by unravelling a long-standing mystery of prime numbers,
does not plan to patent his method.
The problem of conclusively identifying enormous prime numbers
(hundreds of digits long) had baffled mathematicians across centuries
until the Kanpur-based IIT-ian and two of his undergraduate students -
Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena - developed a simple method of cracking
it.
Prime numbers (such as 1, 5, 11, 37...) are divisible only by
themselves or 1. While smaller prime numbers are easy to make out, for
very large numbers, there never had been a formula for "primality
testing" until August 2002.
"I'm not keen on restricting mathematicians and other people from
using this method," says Agrawal,who will soon be leaving for a
year-long stint at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton,
New Jersey.
Felicitated for his mathematical breakthrough by Tata Consultancy
Services here on Friday afternoon, Agrawal delivered a lecture on the
subject. The primality formula opened up new vistas to decode Internet
encryption, besides offering a new ray of hope to other problems in
Mathematics.
"What we've so far achieved is a foolproof method of identifying large
prime numbers," he said, adding that the factoring problem is yet to
be solved. "So why not allow people to work on this technique and
unravel the further problem," he asked, while explaining the reason
for not opting for a patent.
While Agrawal's discovery has fascinated people,who have gone to the
extent of heralding an end to the use of the Internet, Agrawal humbly
accepts it is presently of little or no commercial value.
"The algorithm we discovered will not set new world records because of
its innate lack of speed," he admits. A 100-digit number takes at
least a year to determine its primality, he adds.
"All those reports are misleading and inconsequential now," he said,
adding that the race is, however, on to arrive at new approaches to
primality testing. "We hope to achieve some results at the end of two
years."
Does the discovery hold any relevance to cryptography? "No, not at the
moment. Again because our algorithm is not fast enough for practical
applications," he said. Presently, information security on the
Internet is based on the difficulty of factoring an enormous number.
"For anybody to decrypt such a number, one has to figure out the two
prime numbers (factors) used, which are 250 digits each, or more
long," he said. "Besides, factoring is the key to many other
mathematical problems too."
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without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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